One True Podcast

In this episode, we sit down with scholar Lay Sion Ng for a wide-ranging conversation about Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Ng, the author of Hemingway, Ecology and Culture: Re-reading Hemingway in the Anthropocene , helps us understand how Hemingway can be read as one of the great writers of anthropogenic damage — chronicling how war, industrial modernity, and environmental destructio...

One True Podcast reunites with the Dean of the Hemingway Short Story, the great Don Daiker!  What better way to usher in the autumn than to discuss “The Three-Day Blow,” Hemingway’s curious story from In Our Time ? It is a simple tale of a couple of kids getting drunk, talking baseball and literature, but there is simmering Hemingwayesque tension beneath the surface.  Don guides us through all the...

In this episode, we welcome Lesley Blume back to One True Podcast to mark the 10th anniversary of her acclaimed narrative nonfiction book Everybody Behaves Badly , which chronicles the real-life story behind Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises . The conversation spans Blume's research process, Hemingway's charisma, the role of F. Scott Fitzgerald in brokering Hemingway's career, the...

Welcome to another installment of One True Podcast! A wonderful scholar, raconteur, and true devotee to the ritual of bullfighting, Larry Belcher guides us through the ways Hemingway presents bullfighting in The Sun Also Rises . We explore what bullfighting meant to Hemingway, to Jake Barnes, and its function in the novel. Larry provides historical and cultural context to this controversial and fo...

Virginia Evans, the 2026 PEN/Hemingway Award winner for her novel The Correspondent , joins us to discuss her one true sentence from Hemingway: “You must be prepared to work always without applause."  In this episode, Evans reflects on learning to value the work itself before and after publication, especially following the unexpected success of her novel. She discusses writing intuitively, th...

Join us for the final installment of One True Book Club ’26! In this series of episodes, we are reading the Hemingway-relevant selection, Under Fire by Henri Barbusse, the classic French WWI novel published in 1916. This episode covers the final chapters of the novel. We discuss how Barbusse balances graphic, grotesque depictions of the dead with artistic restraint; we analyze anti-war themes thro...

Welcome back to the fortieth edition of our favorite literary parlor game as our guests choose their favorite sentence from everything Hemingway ever wrote in prose, poetry, correspondence, or journalism.  In this episode, David Morrell, prolific author and creator of the iconic John Rambo character, offers his one true sentence from “In Another Country.”  Morrell – author of First Blood, The Brot...

Welcome to our fifth episode celebrating the centenary of The Sun Also Rises ! On today’s show, we welcome the always excellent David Wyatt to explore the way Hemingway represents “thinking” in the novel. Although Hemingway may not be as celebrated as Faulkner, Joyce, Proust, and Woolf at depicting human consciousness, in this episode David Wyatt guides us through crucial moments in The Sun Also R...

Join us for the second of three installments of One True Book Club ’26! In this series of episodes, we are reading the Hemingway-relevant selection, Under Fire by Henri Barbusse, the classic French WWI novel published in 1916. This episode covers chapters 10-19 of the novel. We discuss how Barbusse finds moments of unexpected humanity amidst the carnage of warfare and his subtle characterization o...

In this episode, we welcome Julia Cooke to discuss her new book, Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World , which profiles three pioneering women journalists: Rebecca West, Emily "Mickey" Hahn, and Martha Gellhorn.  Cooke explores these writers' shared temperament and celebrates their work as a forerunner to New Journalism. Throughout our interview,...

One True Podcast does its part to help your summer reading lists by covering a book that is not by Hemingway, but is Hemingway-relevant: Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire, the 1916 World War I novel that Frederic Henry and Count Greffi name-drop so provocatively in between sips of icy cold champagne and smoothly fluent billiards shots.  This episode covers the first nine chapters of Under Fire , where w...

Live from the University of Evansville campus and the Shanklin Theatre, where Rami Malek once trod the boards…  One True Podcast welcomes Alex Vernon for an interview recorded live in front of a captive audience of students, faculty, and community members in Evansville, Indiana, as he discusses his magnificent new biography of Tim O’Brien, Peace Is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O’Brien . Ve...

In our fourth episode celebrating the centenary of The Sun Also Rises , we examine the theme of religion and its role in the novel. From the title, the epigraphs, the pilgrims on the train, Jake’s self-conscious prayer, the festival of San Fermín, and the idea of fishing as a religious experience, Larry Grimes guides us through this vast topic and shows Hemingway’s religious design in The Sun Also...

Legendary scholar Jackson Bryer joins us once again, this time to discuss one controversial moment in Hemingway’s career, his vicious “poor Scott Fitzgerald” swipe in the original publication of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” We discuss the publication history of this graceless insult, what it says about Hemingway and what it says about Fitzgerald. We go on to discuss “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as a...

In the midst of our centenary festivities around The Sun Also Rises , One True Podcast takes an opportunity to celebrate another Hemingway work published in 1926: The Torrents of Spring .  Elena Zolotariov, author of "'Black and Red Laughter': Subverting Whiteness in Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring " (from the Fall 2023 issue of the  Hemingway Review ), joins us to offer an...

In our third episode celebrating the centenary of The Sun Also Rises , we examine the novel’s anti-Semitic streak and the central role of its Jewish character, Robert Cohn. We welcome the scholar Jeremy Kaye of Moorpark College for a discussion about this incendiary theme, the difference between Hemingway’s anti-Semitism and his characters, Cohn’s Jewish masculinity, his function as a scapegoat, t...

On the happy occasion of the publication of Francesca Wade’s magnificent Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife , we speak with the biographer about Stein’s life, work, and complicated relationships. Wade describes her access to new Stein archives that afforded her a fresh look on the enigmatic writer, the difference between Stein's legend and her life, the particular value of her various publications,...

In our second episode devoted to the centenary of  The Sun Also Rises , we turn our focus to the beloved Count Mippipopolous.  He’s an epicurean and an entrepreneur; he’s battle-tested, arrow-wounded, champagne-enjoying, no-dancing, business-tripping, generous-tipping... and he’s always in love. We discuss his role in the novel, his relationship with Brett and Jake, Hemingway’s original plan for h...

We are thrilled to welcome Susan Shillinglaw, the preeminent John Steinbeck scholar, to discuss one of Hemingway’s contemporaries and fellow Nobel laureates.  Although Hemingway and Steinbeck are not discussed comparatively as frequently as some of his other fellow literary titans, Prof. Shillinglaw talks about Steinbeck’s life, career, and temperament in ways that will inspire us to remap the ove...

Throughout the course of this year, we will celebrate the centenary of The Sun Also Rises by inviting guests on the show to talk about fascinating aspects of the book and its rich history.  In this episode, we explore how the book was actually written—from a sloppy first draft to a modernist masterpiece. What will tracing this composition history tells us about the evolution of The Sun Also Rises...

One True Podcast is back with a look at another Hemingway short story, an under-discussed gem from Winner Take Nothing. One of the weirdest works in his career, “Homage to Switzerland” is a Modernist experiment that tells a similar story three times, each one set in a different Swiss train station.  To walk us through this bizarre tale, we call on excellent Hemingway scholar and actual citizen of...

Happy New Year from One True Podcast! We look forward to a rich, exciting 2026 by looking back to 1926. In our first show of the year, we ask an esteemed guest to take us back exactly one hundred years to see what was happening in Hemingway’s life, work, and world. So, to guide us through Hemingway’s 1926 -- his travels, his relationships, his publishing, and his writing – we welcome the great Hem...

Thank you for making 2025 such a special year for One True Podcast! Together, we devoted shows to the centenary of In Our Time , to our One True Book Club discussion of W.H. Hudson’s The Purple Land , to the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby , and to so much more. We’re so grateful to all of our amazing guests for enriching and enlivening our program, and to all of our listeners for their loya...

One True Podcast would never let 2025 end without one more episode celebrating the centenary of In Our Time , so today we discuss a classic short story from that collection: “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife.” Scholar (and podcaster) Scott Yarbrough visits us from Charleston to lead us through the many elements of this great story: Dr. Adams’s quarrel with Dick Boulton, the doctor’s icy relationsh...

The prominent Faulkner scholar Ahmed Honeini first joined us in 2024 to discuss the rivalry and intertextuality between Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Clearly, in a topic so vast, devoted to the two leading titans of 20th-century American literature, one puny, inexhaustible episode was not enough. So, Ahmed Honeini agreed to come back onto One True Podcast to continue our pursuit of Heming...